


Through Lath Uncovered

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Deep Purple, Music RPF
Genre: Attics, Bare rafters, Denial, M/M, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 09:19:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17281334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: A fight chases Ritchie to the attic, but catching Ian making love with the one who separated them from his vantage point above gives him something which he cannot look away, and something perhaps more troublesome.





	Through Lath Uncovered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Malivrag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malivrag/gifts).



> Written as a contribution to Ficmas 2018 on Rockfic as a prompt fill for Malivrag, who requested a scene where Ritchie is sulking in the rafters of one of Deep Purple's writing hideout mansions, and ends up finding Ian Gillan and Roger Glover having sex in the room unaware of him -leading to him watching, silently scorning, and getting off on it. Mostly a conscious stream of thought fic.

It would happen as so that with yet another one of the darkest, spookiest mansions Deep Purple had chosen as their writing and recording hideaway, as usual, Ritchie fell into one of his darkest moods as appropriate for the scenery. Far scarier than his normal bad moods, and only serving to make the already terrifying structure around them that much more hair-raising.

What nobody had counted on was Ian Gillan striving to wind him up further. It seemed that after their last few nights in such places, he'd become accustomed to Ritchie in his rare form. He was fearless, and he was doing all he could to provoke Ritchie into showing his worst -as though surely, his mood could become any worse.

At first it had been fun and games. Then came when he tried to grab Ritchie's leg, far too close to his nether regions for comfort when he was not warned or in the mood for such a thing.

That resulted in the mug of beer thrown, as well as punches, encouraging Ian to fight back.

However, Roger stood between them, whispering soft 'now-now's and preventing it from happening, citing that there was no need to fight; that they had not come for it and that it would not help. His move left Ian clutching his hand and holding his other in a shaking fist at Ritchie as he fixed him with a death glare, as Ritchie turned away and began to storm from the table.

"Ritchie, please," Jon moaned, reaching a hand out in vain, and with no plan of actually trying to stop what he knew would be impossible to. Before he could plead any further in hopes of reasoning with Ritchie, Roger let go of Ian, came up and placed his hand on Jon's right shoulder, and Paicey came up and did the same on his left. They both closed their eyes and shook their heads with the same pained expression. 

Ritchie used that moment to his advantage to get as far down the hall and out of reach as possible.

Ian was less regretting of it. "Ah, forget him," he snapped.

Just to make his point, Ritchie kicked over the umbrella stand in the front hallway, creating a terrifying boom and echo, just before he doubled his pace and darted up the stairs. If Ian believed him a waste of time, then he definitely did not need to spend more of his time on the bigger waste that Big Ian was.

He had seen the abnormally narrow door in the fold of the wall in the upper hallway, and it was all he was interested now. Opening it revealed a steep and rickety flight of stairs that turned tightly on itself three times in its compact space before arriving up at the attic.

The stairs moaned wickedly as Ritchie lightly hopped over them, skipping every other step on the way up. The sounds they created were just as dark as his mood, and he didn't care who he might have been setting up to have nightmares down below. _Let it scare them_ was his sentiment.

To match the door and stairwell, there was a narrow hallway cutting through the attic -so narrow that Ritchie could touch both of his elbows to the wall on either side of him if he stretched his shoulders out far enough. It left barely enough swing space for the average-sized door to open into it, and there were only two doors along it.

Out of curiosity that distracted him for the shortest moment from just how much he hated Gillan tonight, Ritchie pulled open the first door.

The majority of the space lying beyond it cut to the right of the door, save for a mere half-meter to the left. The ceiling lay low and slanted with the roof. Going further into the room along the opposite wall meant crawling to keep from hitting one's head.

The far wall at the lowest part of the ceiling was lined with heavily-built, wooden boxes. A good number of them had locks and latches on them. _Chests_ Covered in dust and with a faint cast that almost appeared moldy around the bottom edges, they could have come right out of a nightmare scene.

_And they think what's downstairs is frightening..._ Ritchie huffed scornfully. He would have to find a way to lure someone up with him later; he knew better than to try opening one on his own. Even if nothing came of it, it would still spoil the fun of the chance to terrify someone else with something that put a shiver in his very own spine.

A door along the further side of the room opened to a bed surrounded by more storage boxes. Just alongside the bed was a smaller door that appeared to lead to a loo, which deserved every doubt of its functionality by placement and appearance.

As fitting an atmosphere it was, he couldn't hide out here. No, the floor was solid -creaky wood floorboards covered in dark grey carpeting with eerie stains about it. All it would take was for someone to find the attic stairwell to come looking for him and not think twice in climbing it, they'd be able to get to him here just as easily.

_And if there's one person in this house with enough nerve to come poking his nose in here by himself because he can't figure out when to leave me alone, it's him._ Rolling his eyes with disgust, Ritchie backed out in the hallway again, and tried the other door.

Immediately, Ritchie was met with a bitterly cold atmosphere -at least twenty degrees below the rest of the structure. This room, being on the shorter end of the off-center hallway, extended to the left from the door and was flush with the corner of the wall. There was a five foot section of solid-built floor along the wall bordering the hallway, roughly another foot with loose, wooden floorboards laid across joists that didn't quite extend all the way to the far wall, and the large, remaining expanse beneath the sloping roof and over what was approximately two separate rooms below seemed to plunge down into nothingness, aside from joists level with the baseboard of the wall every half-meter or so.

_Perfect._

Lowering himself to the ground to crawl along the wall under the ceiling that hung down with the slope of the roof, Ritchie made his way onto the loose boards that shook ominously, almost threatening to slide on the joists with an exaggerated movement. He perched himself there on the edge, and let his legs hang over the edge of the boards so that he propped his feet on the side of a bare joist. There was a space just slightly longer than his feet between the boards and the strips of lath and plaster forming the ceiling of the room below. From where he sat, he could see the jagged breaks in the plaster on the wall, exposing bare lath and sucking what little heat might have reached the attic to the elements outside the walls.

Gillan wouldn't dare bother him here. His clumsy movements and loud nature wouldn't last a second on the unfinished barrier between floors. And if he thought Ritchie would be so kind as to pull him up if he planted an errant foot through the uncovered lath and plaster, he was sorely mistaken. He, as well as any unsuspecting person who might be in the room below, would be in for quite the surprise if he so much as dared. It was almost enough to make Ritchie wish he would, so that he could frighten himself with the contents of the other side, and then should Gillan find him, the desire to push him through the rafters, Ritchie supposed _might_ become just too great to resist.

He slid himself halfway over the small section of loose boards lying over the joists, and lay over the unfinished frame with his hands braced on another joist. His new perspective allowed him to find places where the plaster keys between the strips of lath had crumbled away. Underneath the loose boards, he found two ominous holes in the lath with lots of snaps and dust in between them. The size and nearly pulverized lath between the two holes suggested that somebody really had fallen through at some time. From that, he could conclude the loose boards were to cover and warn of the hazard, which in their broken state surely wouldn't hold up for another unsuspecting person to grab a joist and save himself.

The flaws in the structure gave him a view straight through to the room below. With the darkness he was in, whether he viewed the holes from an angle around the boards, or through the narrow slits, he was perfectly invisible to the room below.

Ensuring not to forget about how disgusted he was with Ian's antics, Ritchie busied himself in his spot with trying to figure out the contents of the room below. They had all settled with the bedrooms on the back of the first floor, but it appeared to be another bedroom of sorts. At least that was what the one surface looked like from his angle and with the dim lighting. An area rug was spread on the floor beside it, and Ritchie was debating whether it was a pale blue or green, when the click of a door latch and the screech of a hinge made him flinch and lose his grip on the joist.

He turned his head over his shoulder, ready to cast an indignant glare at whoever had come in behind him, and to position however he might deny that he had _not_ nearly just planted a hand into the lath splinters. However, no one stood in the doorway behind him, for the door was shut. Which meant...

More noise floated up from below him. Talking -two voices, indistinguishable as to what words were spoken, but one was distinctively Gillan's. And the floorboards between the second and first floor creaked under their feet.

"Oh, come on; it should be fine," came Ian's reassuring voice, working to cajole whoever was with him into the room. "Nobody's up here; we're hidden to ourselves."

_Or so you think, you fool._

Ritchie craned his neck to view the hole from a good angle without getting directly above it to see who was with Ian. For a moment, he supposed whoever it was had tried to bail on Ian -as he hoped for his own great amusement for Ian to be left alone in that creepy, rickety room.

But then he saw the figure move beside Ian. With light auburn, wispy hair emerging from beneath the brim of a hat. _Roger._

_What in the bloody hell?_

Bending from his resting spot on the loose boards to look was proving a highly unpractical method of getting a view. At first, Ritchie supposed he did not need to waste his time on Big Ian and whatever other stupidity he was to get up to tonight. But it was so intriguing to know just how far he might go that he found himself looking for a better vantage point. The concept of moving about over the exposed rafters was not too frightening for Ritchie's taste, and he was agile enough that it would not be hard. The only real challenge would be keeping quiet, to not be caught, or in actuality, disrupt the happenings below by providing strange sound. It might be fun to spook them, but not before he made his observations.

Ritchie pushed a testing hand on the joists with all the pressure he could exert. Surprisingly for the age of the structure, they were silent. The loose boards were what he would have to take extra care with. Not wanting to take a further chance with those, he sat up and extended his feet to the joist he'd had his hands on, then slid swiftly onto the adjacent one. He eventually worked his way out to the other side of the hole, to view it straight on without leaning over.

His timing was excellent. He achieved his vantage point, just when Ian and Roger leaned into each other, having a long, passionate kiss, right before dropping onto the surface he'd figured to be a narrow bed. Once on it, they tangled themselves together, continuing to kiss, and Ian moaned -more loudly than he ought to have dared at night in Ritchie's mind.

_You've got to be joking, Gillan. Carrying on from your episode in the car last year?_ Ritchie mused to himself how truly disgusting it was. _And I dare think what a hypocrite you are, Roger. Calling him a pervert when called out on the act, yet engaging again behind closed doors!_

Examining it closer from his better view, Ritchie determined that what he'd seen wasn't quite a bed, but rather, an extra wide settee. Perhaps the room had once been a nursery and it had been a place for the mother, maid, or whichever caregiver was on duty to sit down while attending to whatever obnoxious, childish things were going on. Probably no better than the obnoxious sounds coming from it with two adults who in that moment, Ritchie felt hardly deserved to be called that.

Or maybe it was a larger bedroom and it was a dressing settee set away from the bed. That made less sense. Why choose to do such a thing on a settee if a perfectly good bed was available?

_That's why,_ Ritchie thought darkly as Ian slung his too-long legs up against the side of the settee as he rolled about with Roger.

He realized that he was shaking where he sat across the joists. _How pathetic._ Plenty of people could stir him up to great annoyance, but he'd never encountered anyone who could reduce him to a shivering mess of rage like Gillan. How dare he, even with a floor between them, without even trying...

_Pull it together; he's bloody useless._

Despite the cold drafts coming through the rafter walls, Ritchie was burning hot and felt sweat forming over his body. Errant drips rolled down the small of his back beneath his shirt, and the crawling sensation made him shake more in combination with the shock of the icy airflow against him. Worst was the discomfort and pressure building low in his pelvis and between his legs. Surely, that was from sitting bent up on the joist so that the waistband of his pants dug deep into his lower abdomen and hips; the combination of heat and his position was cutting off circulation.

"Oh, do be quiet," Roger moaned, burying his face in Ian's shoulder. "You'll perk Blackmore's curiosity and get us caught if he hears us."

"Oh, forget him. He won't know what to think if he pokes his nose in here -we'll have him stumped for once!"

_Only in your dreams, Gillan. I've got you figured out on this one. You are truly a pervert. And now I've plenty reason to know._

"Beside that point, surely, it's better for us to be together alone here than with that evil wanker," Ian murmured seductively, before taking his legs from the back of the settee and flipping Roger beneath himself in one fell swoop -fast, yet more gentle than it ought to have been with his size.

_Sure, you call me a wanker now,_ Ritchie thought as the pressure became unbearable. Trying to reposition himself on the joist he sat on to not have his knees bent up so tight to his chest led only to grinding himself on the narrow edge of the board, and made the problem he'd tried to ignore worse.

There was no denying it now; any more shaking would force him to retreat to the finished floor to stay silent, and there was no way to sit or lie across the joists that wasn't painful without taking action soon enough.

_Well, if I'm going to be a wanker, it's going to be on my own terms. Mine only._

Ritchie braced his hands on the joist he sat on with a firm grip, and slowly, carefully walked his feet out behind him to the next joist, as of descending a ladder, only horizontally. At first, he exhaled with the lowered pressure from straightening his hips out, but when he lay flat with one joist digging into his chest and the other digging into his thighs, it felt as though all the blood in his body was being retained in his middle, and with gravity, only further weighing on his erection.

_Sadly for you, Gillan, I'm the one who has control over whether I really am a wanker or not; not you._

Seeing that his body was well balanced across two joists and not depending on the force of his hands pushing to keep from falling through the middle, he let go of the front joist with one hand and reached down his side to slide a hand through his waistband. He could no longer see through the foot holes in the lath now, but a gap one lath-strip wide -plenty large to see through from his side, but not from below -was just below his eyes.

Just as he resumed his viewing, Ian convulsed and wailed. Roger clung to him, mostly pinned in place.

_It's not as if you're any better. Calling on me being a wanker and going off to howl like a cat in heat._

Then as Ian wailed even louder, Ritchie stifled the quietest whine in the crook of his elbow, feeling the joist dig further into his chest with the motion as all his weight the front joist was bearing settled there.

It was just when Ian and Roger suddenly lay over, warm and comfortable in each other's arms and going quiet and still, that Ritchie hissed at the hot sticky feeling now on his hand, in his pants and trapped along his legs.

_Disgusting, Gillan. Bloody disgusting._

Still shaking and seething, Ritchie crawled across the joists and climbed back onto the stable portion of the floor to lie cold and sticky on the hard, dusty floorboards in the dark. He wiped his hand on the back of his pants leg as he tried bitterly to deny the images flooding his mind of how he might have fought back far less submissively, and just what he might have done, had he been in Roger's place.


End file.
